UNIT 1: The Self from Various Perspectives

Intended Learning Outcomes:

 Discuss the different representations and conceptualizations of the self from various
disciplinal perspectives.
 Examine the different influences, factors and forces that shape the self.
 Compare and contrast how self has been represented across the different disciplines
and perspectives.
 Demonstrate critical and reflective thought in analyzing the development of one’s self
and identity by developing a theory of the self.

LESSON 1: Philosophy:
Western Philosophical Perspective on the Self
What is Philosophy?
 Its etymology comes from the Greek – Philos – love, and Sophia – wisdom – “love of
wisdom”.
 Arose from the idea of seeking to understand fundamental truths about us, the world we
live, our relationship with the world we live, and everything in between.
 Traditionally divided into major areas of study:
o Metaphysics – study of the nature of reality.
 Is there a God? Is the world strictly composed of matter? If people have
minds, how is it related to the body?
o Epistemology – the study of knowledge.
 What is knowledge? Do we know anything at all? How do we know what
we know?
o Ethics – concerning with what we ought to do and what it would be best to do.
 What is good? What makes actions of people good? Is morality objective
or subjective?
o Logic – nature and structure of arguments of reasons.
 What constitutes “good” or “bad” reasoning? How do we determine
whether a given piece of reasoning is good or bad?
Why do we have to study philosophy?
 Gives us the ability to think critically, to question things, which aids us in understanding
ourselves better.
 Aids us in living a good life by knowing what is morally right from wrong.
 Understand your self from different perspectives.
Ancient Philosophy (1000 BC to 500 AD) before the end of the Roman empire.
Major periods:
1. Milesian School (Pre-Socratic philosophers)
2. Ancient Triumvirate (Socrates, Plato, Aristotle)
3. Post Aristotelians
1. Pre-Socratic philosophers

 Beginning of western philosophy and the shift from mythology to philosophy,

grounded by knowledge and science.
 Deals with the origin and the general structure of the universe –cosmology.
 Cosmo-centric philosophers seek the meaning and origin of the human self:
o Thales – known to be the first philosopher of Western Philosophy.
- Attributed the ultimate being to water.
- The speculation of his reasoning includes water being vital to life,
nourishing living organisms. And water can change from and to
vapor, liquid, and ice; water is used in religious rituals for
purification and other uses.
o Anaximander – anchored to Thales’ view, if the origin will be a particular
element of nature, such as water, then fire (or its contrary) cannot co-exist.
- Thus, he identified the original matter out of all beings originate as
Apeiron –indefinite, unbounded.
o Anaxemenes – regards “air” as an extension of breath, implying the origin
of life; our soul, being air that keeps us together; and air encloses the
whole world.
2. The Ancient Triumvirate

 Socrates
o Left no writings of his own, but is known mainly through Plato, one of his
students.
o Declared a distinction between true knowledge (eternal, absolute, and
unchanging) and opinion (temporal, changing, and relative).
o Know thyself. – “An unexamined life is not worth living.”
o “The soul is immortal, and the care of the soul is the task of philosophy.”
 o Socrates believed that one’s death is not the end, but merely a departure
for afterlife. And that death is the departure of the soul for the eternal
world.
Two Aspects of Reality
1. Physical world: changeable, transient, and imperfect; World of
Senses/Matter

2. Spiritual world: unchanging, eternal, perfect; The World of Ideas/ Form

- Our souls (self) strive for wisdom and perfection, and reason is the
soul’s tool to achieve such a state.
- The soul is a unified, indissoluble, immortal entity that remains the
same over time, and that is in the very likeness of the divine.
 Plato
o Separated the soul into three (3) parts:
- The appetitive part seeks the fulfillment of bodily pleasures, such
as food, drink, sex, and all the worldly needs and desires of an
individual.
- The spirited or emotional part seeks honor and dignity. Accounts
for the basic emotions such as love, anger, ambition,
aggressiveness, empathy.
- The intellectual part (reason) seeks for the truth and knowledge.
the divine essence that lets us think deeply (wisdom), make wise
choices and achieve a true understanding of eternal truths. The
intellectual part must be in control of all the parts, otherwise the
individual’s desires will create chaos as it strives for its own
fulfillment.
Harmony: Justice in the individual, social and political levels.

 Aristotle
- The mind is a blank slate.
- The self consists of matter and form; matter is in a continuous process of
developing and becoming.
- The process of completion is through experiences as knowledge is acquired
through the senses (and this knowledge is true).
- That intellect in this sense is separable and unmixed as it is in its essential
nature. It alone is immortal, as when intellect is set free from its present
conditions, it’ll appear as just and nothing more.
- The soul is distinguishable by three:
 - the nutritive (all plants and animals have been capable of
absorption of nutrition, therefore both have nutritive soul).
- the sensory (it is what distinguishes animals from plants. As
Aristotle thought it was indicated by a lack of movement).
- And finally, the thinking (it is what he has thought that distinguishes
the humans from all other forms of life).

3. Post Aristotelians

 Stoicism – calls for people to accept reality and give up attachments to their
fears and desires, hence is a form of realism.
- Apathy or indifference to pleasure.
LESSON 2: Western vs Eastern
Philosophical View of Self:
The concept of self perceived by the Western and Eastern philosophy are comparably
opposite. In the West, there exists a multitude of definitions of the “self”, while in the East the
predominant view is that the self is rather an illusion.
In general, Western philosophy acknowledges the existence of “self” whereas the
philosophy in the East denies its presence.

Western Philosophy
Rationalism
- This philosophy regards reason as the chief source and test of knowledge. That is, reality
itself has an inherently logical structure.
René Descartes: A rationalist
 “I think therefore I am” or Cogito Ergo Sum
 Self can exist independently of the body but doesn’t deny the association of the
body to the self.
 identifies consciousness with thinking.
 The laic notion of “soul” is considered identical with the philosophical notion of
“self”. In fact, this connotation comes from the Judeo-Christian religion. In former
epochs of human history, the soul was associated with the so-called animism. The
scientific notion of “soul” is defined as “immediate experience” or “the
constitutive part of the self, remaining after the exclusion of the body.
 The self or the soul, in turn, is the “act of experience”, contrasted with the
“content of experience” (world or matter) (Krechmer, 1996: 7; see Deikman,
1982).
 A human person is composed of two parts, namely, a material body and a non-
material mind.
 The mind or the soul is superior to the body for it is in the mind that “mental
states” occur. This is because for Descartes, the mental states, such as thinking,
imagining, and analyzing, rather than the physical states of the body, such as pain,
hunger, and thirst, are fundamental to our life as persons.
 In short, it is the mind that makes us humans -thus, I think therefore I am.
 “mind is the real self.”
Empiricism
- It is the idea that all knowledge comes from only experience and observations. That is,
all concepts must originate from experience.
John Locke: An Empiricist
 “The self is consciousness”
 The human mind is a tabula rasa (blank state).
 The conscious awareness and memory of former experiences are the keys in
understanding the self.
 Every aspect of the physical body is integrated with personal identity. The body
changes. The physical self changes.
 holds that personal identity is a matter of psychological continuity. He considered
personal identity (or the self) to be founded on consciousness (viz. memory), and
not on the substance of either the soul or the body.
 “whatever has the consciousness of present and past actions is the same person
to whom they both belong”. What he means by this is that the self is persistent to
the extent of the memories held by an individual. Locke believes the self to be an
immaterial thing, external to the physical body.
 Locke defines self to be, “a conscious, thinking thing which is sensible or conscious
of pleasure and pain, capable of happiness or misery, and so is concerned for itself
as far as that consciousness extends” (278). The self is self-interested and capable
of self-identification. This differs from the concept of “man” which in Locke’s
usage means others perception of an individual. For example, under Locke’s
definition of self if one were to lose all of their memories, then they are not the
same self as before, but they are the same “man.” Therefore, Locke acknowledges
that the self is potentially subject to rapid, fundamental change external to any
physical variation.
David Hume: Empiricist, Sceptic & Nihilist

 “There is no self”
 There is no self but there is a collection of successive perceptions that can be used to
define “self”
 When people examine their content of experience, what they will see are just impressions
and ideas that results to imagination.
 Thought of the mind as a theatrical stage, composed of a flow of continuous, but
inconstant perceptions, which vary all the time.
 According to Hume, “identity” is solely a quality, which we attribute to an object, including
the self, but due to the inconstancy of our perception, the self is a fiction.
Immanuel Kant
  “We construct the self”
 Kant’s concept of self is a contrary to Hume’s claim that self is but a container for fleeting
sensations and perceptions. Instead, we perceive and experience an organized world of
objects which creates the world that is familiar, predictable, and significantly be called as
mine.
 For Kant, the self, as such, is a noumenon (a Ding-an-sich) and not a phenomenon.
 According to Kant, the human person has a two-fold nature, namely: 1)homo noumenon,
2) homophaenomenon
 Noumenon – derived from Kant’s epistemology, refers to the essence of things. Cannot
be known because, as the essence of things, it is beyond experience.
 Phaenomenon – refers to the things as it appears to the observer. The empirical part of a
thing
 We all have an inner and an outer self which together form our consciousness.
 The inner self is comprised of our psychological state and our rational intellect.
 The outer self includes our sense and the physical world.
 When speaking of the inner self, there is apperception.

Eastern Philosophy
Buddhism
 Teachings based on Siddhartha Gautama or Buddha (“the awakened one”)
 “Individual self” is an illusion. It is not possible to separate self from its surroundings.
 The true nature of self is discovered only through inquiry, doubting, and negating self.
 Buddhism argues that the self as such does not exist, that it is an illusion – “The self
does not exist apart from the states of consciousness.

The four (4) noble truths (that lead to Nirvana)

 Dukkha: the noble truth of suffering.

 Samudaya: the noble truth of the origin of suffering
 Nirodha: the noble truth of the cessation of suffering
 Marga: the noble truth of the way leading to the cessation of suffering
The Eightfold Path (that is a prescription given to us by Buddha to cure the samsaric condition
of Dukkha)

 Divided into three subcategories: wisdom (prajna), ethics (sila), and meditation
(Samadhi).
o Right view – refers to the seeing the world correctly, thus accepting the four
noble truths. Failure to see this gives birth to greed, hatred, and ignorance.
 o Right thought – intentions of one’s action.
- Karma is formed through one’s intention.
o Right speech – cannot be simplified to “do not lie” as truth can be deliberately
harmful (like unwantedly pointing out somebody’s flaws) or if in some situations,
telling truth may cause event more harm (white lie).
- When we speak, we must consider what is helpful and what is not.
o Right action – concerning the motivation in behind everything we do. We must
perform our motivations in a right manner of action.
o Right livelihood – legal and ethical way of living.
o Right effort – has four dimensions: preventing negative states from arising in the
mind, abandoning any that have arisen, producing positive ones, and cultivating
one’s already present.
o Right mindfulness – constant awareness and watchfulness of our sensory
experiences.
o Right concentration – suggests that one must train himself to avoid unfocused,
sporadic minds to rest on a single object.
The four (4) foundations of mindfulness:

 Contemplation of the body

 Contemplation of feeling (repulsive, attractive, or neutral)
 Contemplation of the state of mind
 Contemplation of the dhammas (phenomena)

Confucianism
 The value of relationship (communal act)
 Centered in morality, interpersonal ethics and the cultivation of the civility, which is
understood to contribute to the establishment of a harmonious and well-ordered
society.
 The self is conceived as a “relational self” – “one which is intensely aware of the social
presence of other human beings.
 The self, according to this doctrine, can be achieved through a harmonization of one’s
everyday communication with other individuals in society at large.

Taoism
 Non-doing or doing nothing.
 Not acting against the natural order but rather letting things flow in rythm.
 Embracing changes.
  It doesn’t think about it. It just does. And when it does, it doesn’t appear to do much of
anything but Things Get Done.
Way of Self-Reliance

 Recognizing who we are, what we’ve got to work with, and what works best for us.
The Great Nothing

 Some things are just unexplainable and that’s okay because not everything needs
explaining. “Why does a chicken, I don’t why”
Activity 1:

This is Andrew, a unicorn. Suppose that you happen to meet him in the pathway, and you got curious
about his existence. As a young philosopher, what will be your question/impression about him?

Note: Anchor your questions from the philosophies discussed. Choose at least three (3) philosophers
from each period (i.e., Ancient, Western, Eastern) and create a question based on their theories and
explain why you came up with that question/impression.

Example: as a stoic, my impression would be that Andrew doesn’t really look that way. That,
yes, they have existed long time ago, but Siberian unicorn don’t look anything like him, except for
his horn. A Siberian unicorn is but a family of rhino that is fully covered in a shaggy coat.
Rubrics:
Mastery Accuracy Delivery
(30%) (40%) (30%)
Students can discuss Students can discuss Students have
a concept/ the concept of the delivered their
philosophy they philosopher they argument with high
chose, with utmost have chosen, with confidence and
legitimate utmost legitimate strong sense of
information to information to conviction.
support the support the
argument. argument.

Mastery (30%) Accuracy (40%) Delivery (30%)

Students can discuss Students can discuss Students have

a concept/ the concept of the delivered their
philosophy they philosopher they argument with
chose, with enough have chosen, with moderate confidence
legitimate enough legitimate and moderate sense
information to information to of conviction.
support the support the
argument. argument.

Mastery (20%) Accuracy (30%) Delivery (20%)

Students can discuss Students can discuss Students have

a concept/ the concept of the delivered their
philosophy they philosopher they argument with low
chose, with poor have chosen, with confidence and poor
information to poor information to sense of conviction.
support the support the
argument. argument.

Mastery (15%) Accuracy (25%) Delivery (15%)

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https://www.britannica.com/topic/taiji
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Sedley, D. (1998). Ancient philosophy. In the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
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